Case Number 05078

Igby Goes Down

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All Rise...

Judge Bryan Byun is bored and disaffected with bored and disaffected teenager movies.

The Charge

Insanity is relative.

Opening Statement

Burr Steers (the Flock of Seagulls guy in Pulp Fiction) made his directorial
debut in 2002 with Igby Goes Down, a bleak teen-angst comedy laden with
more than a few echoes of The Catcher in the Rye. Unfortunately, Steers
seems to have picked mostly the really, really annoying echoes.

Facts of the Case

Igby (Kieran Culkin) is a troubled teen. Coming from a wealthy East Coast
family, you'd think he'd have it made, but he's saddled with one of the most
dysfunctional families in the long cinematic tradition of dysfunctional
families: a self-absorbed, emotionally frigid mother (Susan Sarandon); a
schizophrenic, institutionalized father (Bill Pullman); and an amoral shark of a
brother (Ryan Phillipe). What's a poor little rich kid to do when the world
becomes too much for him? Why, if he's read J.D. Salinger, which Igby clearly
has, the solution is to run away and wander aimlessly around New York, having
lots of Salingeresque adventures.

The Evidence

In keeping with the film's aspirations toward becoming a postmillennial
Catcher in the Rye, we see young, disaffected Igby run a familiar
gauntlet of upper-class twits and phonies, commenting on them all with the
requisite snarky sarcasm, before escaping into Manhattan and taking up with an
equally disaffected student (Claire Danes) and his godfather's kept woman
(Amanda Peets)—who, of course, is also disaffected.

Igby is very much designed to appeal to a certain elitist mindset.
Neophyte writer-director Burr Steers devotes the entirety of his film to
pandering to the kind of self-impressed, pseudointellectual hipsters who will no
doubt connect with the sullen title character, who spouts a steady stream of
arch, unbearably "witty" observations. This film is little more than a
two-hour sneer.

Igby is a tiresome kid, and Igby Goes Down is a tiresome movie.
Perhaps a director with a more critical eye could have made this film more
palatable, but Steers is so obviously in love with his own cleverness that it's
simply taken for granted that we'll be fascinated with the travails of a spoiled
teenaged jerk. If there's a lasting legacy of the past several years, I'm hoping
it'll include the demise of movies where you're asked to care about the
oh-so-tragic ennui of characters who have never known a day of real suffering in
their lives.

Not that there's anything inherently offensive about tales of wealthy
Manhattanites. Woody Allen's been mining that ground for decades with often
brilliant results, and Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, a film teeming with
young, pretentious socialites, manages to humanize and elicit sympathy for its
characters without pandering or flaunting a snarkier-than-thou attitude.
Metropolitan works where this film fails in that Stillman, unlike Steers,
is all too aware of what shallow and meaningless lives his protagonists lead.
Stillman shows us the vulnerability behind these kids who have had it so easy
that they don't know how to be the adults they aspire to become.
Writer-directors like Allen and Stillman, and Wes Anderson, whose vastly
superior Rushmore this film
superficially resembles, may observe their subjects with a critical, sardonic
eye, but they're never mean-spirited; there's an essential compassion and
sympathy for human nature underlying even the darkest moments.

In lieu of compassion, Steers can offer only glib hostility towards easy
targets, and endless pages of the kind of "quirky" dialogue never
spoken by actual people. Eventually you're too tired of the movie showing you
how knowing and hip it is to care much about the characters. It's like spending
two hours with one of those vain, self-absorbed types who's always telling you
stories about how they one-upped someone or how stupid everything is. After a
while you realize that they're mostly trying to convince themselves that they're
as superior as they try to appear.

MGM's DVD release of Igby Goes Down offers a decent, 2.35:1
anamorphic widescreen presentation. The transfer offers a rich, clean image,
although the print is marred by occasional specks and minor defects. While sound
is not the focus of this character-based film, the DVD features a subdued but
crisp Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track.

Bonus features include an audio commentary by Steers and Culkin (which is
either informative and entertaining, or informative and barely tolerable,
depending on your feelings about the film itself), a selection of deleted scenes
with optional commentary, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and trailers.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

If Igby is an obnoxious bore, it's not the fault of its cast. Kieran
Culkin, likable and effective in The Mighty and The Cider House Rules, nearly
manages to make Igby an interesting human being, and the supporting actors turn
in solid comic performances that would have come to life on a worthier
canvas.

Closing Statement

There's a watchable movie in here somewhere, but it doesn't take long for the
film to squander its early promise. This coming-of-age, anti-authoritarian story
is so hamfistedly derivative that eventually you have to ask yourself if it's
worth sitting through the shoddy knockoff when you've already seen the vastly
superior originals. The old joke applies here: Igby Goes Down was better
the first time I saw it, when it was called The Graduate. It's shallow and
masturbatory, confuses cheap sarcasm with real wit, and has nothing new to
say.

It's possible to make good movies on this theme. Wes Anderson has done it
twice, with Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. While it's
painfully evident that Burr Steers has seen all of these films, it's just as
painfully evident that he has failed to learn anything from them.

The Verdict

All charges against Culkin and the rest of the cast are dismissed, since
their entertaining performances have nothing to do with why this film is so
unendurably annoying. However, the court finds Burt Steers guilty of reckless
self-indulgence and contempt for his audience. He is sentenced to ten years
working at a Blockbuster in Hoboken, New Jersey.